Back to the Future: Minecraft 1.12, Minecraft 1.8 and Destiny

It's been a while since I've written a news article, that's our my bad, and something we'll try and improve on going forward!

Minecraft 1.12

First of all Minecraft 1.12 is released next week, it doesn't bring a huge amount to minigames. It does provide a custom achievement system which we will adapt to once we implement achievements.

It's highly likely we'll at least have support for the 1.12 client by the time Minecraft 1.12 is released. I'll update all instances to actual 1.12 as soon as it available and stable.

Any Client Version

Over the past week as part of 1.12 support I've been investigating what would be required to support multiple different client versions on the network. As of today, you can connect to Caldonia with any client between 1.8 and 1.11.2.

Importantly you'll still need to use at least 1.9 to play Glide and some things like the lobby jetpack will act differently if the user is connected with a 1.8 client.

Minecraft 1.8

So what's the point of supporting 1.8 clients, you ask? Welp, I finally give up, I genuinely do think 1.9 combat could be better with more work from Mojang, but there's no indication they're going to.

As such, over the next few weeks I'm going to move Survival Games completely to 1.8, UHC and Speedy UHC will also move to 1.8, but will also be available with 1.9+ combat on private instances. Eternal will also move to 1.8, it's intention was to be a 1.9+ combat training tool, so we'll have to consider what to do with it.

For clarification, with the exception of Glide, any version client can play on any version instance, however the best experience will always be if they are matched. Alternatively, a 1.11+ client to a 1.8 server is the next best thing.

Destiny

I enjoy working on Caldonia, however it's at the sacrifice of being able to work on other projects. That's fine, it's something I'm want to do. That being said I also want to realise the goal of having active players on all the time, to justify the time invested.

As such I'm setting a target, by the start of September 2017 I want to Caldonia to have at least 20 concurrent players on it during peak times (eu/us).

If it doesn't reach that, then it's likely I'll consider shutting the doors. Not something I really want to do, but I'd rather have the ability to spend time on other projects that could reach more people.

Don't worry, I'm not stupid, I know that to get there we're going to have to start advertising, and attempting to retain players. We'll be calling for your help from time to time, I'm sure.